Magid / Zafar (2025)

A young man turns up late for work to a busy kitchen only to be teased by his colleagues - they assume that “Magid” (Eben Figueiredo) has been out with his girlfriend. He bats back their suggestive comments and gets on with things, but fairly quickly another lad (Gurjeet Singh) arrives and unless you have the gaydar of Atilla the Hun you immediately get the drift. It’s got the feel of the shorter “Boiling Point” (2019) to it for the first five minutes, but once the plot is laid before us it becomes quite uncomfortably pedestrian. It’s clear that "Zafar" wants a meaningful conversation with “Magid” but an hectic restaurant would seem an unlikely place for an heart-to-heart amidst the spitting oil and bustling hubbub, and after a few tense moments I felt it rather petered out. It does serve to remind us that there are still quite a few cultural differences amongst the attitudes held in Britain even in the 2020s, and it’s worth a watch, it just suggested more than it delivered.